The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  At noon they left the forest, and rode for a time along the open steppe. It was cold and gray and wet; they rode past smashed Russian tanks and trucks abandoned during the June retreat, then moved back into the forest for an hour, watered the horses at a stream, and emerged at a point where the railroad line passed about a hundred yards from the birch groves. The line was a single track that seemed to go from nowhere to nowhere, disappearing into the distance on either end. “This goes northwest to Baranovici,” Razakavia told him. “Then to Minsk, Orsha, Smolensk, and Viazma. Eventually to Mozhaisk, and Moscow. It is the lifeline of the Wehrmacht Army Group Center. Our Russians tell us that a German force cannot survive more than sixty miles from a railhead.”

A man called Bronstein assembled the bomb for the rails. A Soviet army ammunition box, made of zinc, was filled with cheddite. British, in this case, from the honored guest, though the ZWZ in Poland also manufactured the product. A compression fuse, made of a sulfuric-acid vial and paper impregnated with potassium chloride, was inserted beneath the lid of the box.

De Milja sat by Bronstein as the bomb was put together. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.

“I was a teacher of science,” Bronstein said, “in Brest Litovsk.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and set it on a stone while he packed cheddite into the box. “And this is science.”

They dug a hole beneath the rail and inserted the mine, the weight of the locomotive would do the rest. A scout—Frantek—came galloping up to Razakavia just as it began to get dark. “It comes now,” he said.

The band settled into positions at the edge of the forest. De Milja lay on his stomach, using a rotten log for cover, feeling the cold from the earth seeping up into his body. The train came slowly, ten miles an hour, in case the track was sabotaged. It was. Bronstein’s device worked—a dull bang, a cloud of dirt blown sideways from beneath the creeping locomotive, wheels ripping up the ties, then the locomotive heeling over slowly as a jet of white steam hissed from its boiler. A man screamed. A German machine-gun crew on a platform mounted toward the rear of the train began to traverse the forest.

De Milja sighted down the barrel of the Simonov. From the slats of a cattle car he could see pinpricks of rifle fire. He returned it, squeezing off ten rounds, then changing magazines as bullets rattled in the branches above his head. One of Razakavia’s men leaped from a depression in the earth on the other side of the track and threw a bomb into the last car on the train. The walls blew out and the wooden frame started to burn. German riflemen, some wearing white bandages, jumped out of the train on the side away from the gunfire and began to shoot from behind the wheels of the cars. De Milja heard a cry from his left, a bullet smacked into his log. He aimed carefully and fired off his magazine, then looked up. A figure in field gray had slumped beneath the train, the wind flapping a bandage that had come loose from his head. De Milja changed magazines again. Some of the German soldiers were shooting from behind a tank chained to a flatcar, de Milja could hear the ricochet as gunfire from the forest hit the iron armor.

Another group of Germans began firing from the coal tender, half on, half off the rails where the locomotive had dragged it, and the machine gun came back to life. De Milja heard the sharp whistle that meant it was time to break off the engagement and head back into the forest.

He ran with the others, his breath coming in harsh gasps, up a slight rise to where several young women were guarding the ponies. They left immediately on orders from Kotior, two wounded men slung sideways across the backs of the horses. A third man was shot too badly to move, and Razakavia had to finish him off with a pistol. The rest of the band rode off at a fast trot, vanishing into the forest as the railcar burned brightly in the gray evening.

“The Germans, they always counterattack,” Kotior told him. “Always.” He pointed up at several Fiesler-Storch reconnaissance planes, little two-seater things that buzzed back and forth above the forest. “This is how partisans die,” Kotior added.

They were up there all night, crisscrossing the dark sky. So there could be no fires, no smoking outside the huts. De Milja pulled the blanket tight around his shoulders and loaded box magazines. The cold made his fingers numb, and the springs, like everything Rus-sian, were too strong, tended to snap the feeder bar back into place, ejecting the bullet two feet in the air and producing a snarl of laughter from Kotior. Four hundred miles to the east, on the line Smolensk/Roslavl/Bryansk, the Wehrmacht was fighting. How the hell did they manage in this kind of cold? he wondered. And it was only October. At night the temperature fell and the puddles froze and huge clouds gathered in the sky, but it did not snow. And in the morning it was blue and sunny: winter isn’t coming this year.

At dawn, an alert. De Milja in position on the camp perimeter, aiming into the forest gloom. Somewhere south, perhaps a mile away, he could hear the faint popping of riflery, then the chatter of a light machine gun. Two scouts arrived at midday—they’d had a brush with a Ukrainian SS unit. “They shot at us,” the scout said. “And we shot back. So they fired the machine gun.” He was about fifteen, grinned like a kid. “Frantek went around and he got one of them, we think. They were screaming and yelling ‘fucking Bolsheviks’ and every kind of thing like that. Calling for God.”

“Where is Frantek?” Razakavia said.

The boy shrugged. “He led them away into the marsh. He’ll be back.”

“Banderovsty.” Razakavia spat the word.

He meant Ukrainian nationalists under the command of the leader Bandera, absorbed into an SS regiment called the Nachtigall. Kotior turned to de Milja and explained. “They do what the SS won’t.”

With Razakavia and Kotior he went to a town on the outskirts of Brest Litovsk. The owner of a bakery sold them milled oats and rye flour for bread. “We pay for this,” Razakavia told him as they knocked at the back door. “Not everyone does.” There was an ancient relationship in these lands, de Milja knew, between groups of armed men and keepers of granaries. Both sides had to survive, together they defined where honor might lie.

The iron door swung open and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of baking bread, swept over de Milja. “Come in,” the baker said. He had a pink face, and a big belly in an undershirt. They sat at a marble-top table, there was flour everywhere. The baker wiped his hands on his shirt and accepted a cigarette from Razakavia. Behind him the brick ovens were at work, with sometimes a lick of flame where the furnace doors didn’t quite meet. A black bread was brought over and cut up with a sawtooth knife.

Razakavia and the baker talked about the weather. The baker shook his head grimly. “All the old babas have been reading the signs. Caterpillars and geese and bear scat. Probably nonsense, but even if it is, they’re all saying the same thing: it’s going to freeze your balls off.”

Razakavia nodded and chewed on a piece of bread. He reached into a pocket and counted out zlotys he’d bought with the gold rubles. The money lay in stacks on the marble table.

“It’s in the barn in the village of Krymno,” the baker said. “You know where I mean? The same as last spring. In wooden bins.”

“I remember,” Razakavia said.

“You want to take care on the roads, over there.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Somebody goes out and doesn’t come back. Somebody else has to give up a horse. People moving around in the forest.”

“A partisan band?”

“Who knows? These days it could be anything.” He nodded at de Milja. “Who’s your friend?”

“One of us. He’s from down in the Volhynia.”

“Polish?”

“Yes,” de Milja said.

“One of my grandmothers was Polish,” the baker said. “Crazy, she was. All with spells and potions and times of the moon, but good to us. Always jam or a little cake.” The baker’s face softened as he remembered. He put out a hand and de Milja shook it. “Times change, maybe we can have something to drink,” he said.

De Milja smiled. “Better have it now,” he said.

The baker laughed. “Well,” he said.

The dirt track back to the forest went through a little settlement called Gradh. They smelled smoke a mile away, walked the horses in a wide circle around the village. Near the old Jewish cemetery was a great scar of newly packed earth, they saw a lost shoe and a bloody shirt. Above the village, ravens circled in a haze of dirty gray smoke.

“It was a Jewish town,” Razakavia said.

The weather. At first you didn’t notice. A leaf fell. You put on a jacket, took it off later. Then suddenly it tried to kill you, you hid from it as best you could but it seemed to search, to seek you out. In the swamps and woodlands there was mist, snow showers, a freeze, a thaw, heavy rain; then impossible, unimaginable mud. Like dull-minded peasants, de Milja and Frantek would stand by the road—the “road,” the “Moscow highway”—and stare at the German columns. Some days the equipment could move, some days it ground the lightly frozen earth into the mud below, and sank. At night they could hear the panzer tanks—every four hours the engines had to be run to a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit, which took about fifteen minutes. Then they had to move the tanks around, to use the transmissions—because the oil was of too low a viscosity to protect the gears. Razakavia’s forest was well behind the front lines, a night attack was unlikely. But the Germans could not be sure, and the Soviet air force sent over a plane to harass them now and then, to stir up the defenses on icy nights.

The partisans attacked a repair train the following week. This time Bronstein’s bomb derailed all seven cars, and some of the railway workers tried to surrender, as did a Wehrmacht railroad officer. But every German was shot down, as well as most of the Poles and Ukrainians who worked on the track. The partisans looted the train, taking tools and coal and cigarettes and ammunition. One of the Polish laborers, lightly wounded, pleaded for mercy. Frantek worked the bolt on his rifle, but de Milja stepped between them. “Leave him to me,” he said.

The man fell on his knees and tried to wrap his arms around de Milja’s legs. “Mercy,” he said.

De Milja took him by the shoulder of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. “Stop it,” he hissed in Polish. The man wept. “I have children,” he said. “Four children, little girls.”

De Milja saw Razakavia staring at him coldly: take him as a gift, but don’t ask for another. “It’s all right,” de Milja said. “You can come with us.”

All around him, in the smoking wreckage of the repair train—a tangle of coaches with smashed windows, a flatcar with a crane bent at right angles—single shots rang out as the crew was finished off.

The man de Milja had saved was, by trade, a cobbler, and spent his first days in the encampment sewing boots and improvising repairs of all kinds. De Milja took him, late one afternoon, to a village near the forest, where a young widow sold vodka. If you paid a little extra you could drink it in a toolshed behind her house—she would even supply a few sticks of wood for the stove.

“My family is from Rovno, south of the Pripet marsh,” the man explained. “Life wasn’t so bad. The Poles had to watch it down there, but there was plenty of work, the police protected us, we had everything we needed. Maybe a little more.”

He took a pull from the vodka bottle, wiped his mustache with his fingers. Outside it was growing dark, and rain drummed on the roof of the shed. “Then, September of ’39. The Russians came and occupied the town. We were working people, didn’t put on airs, and we’d always been decent to the peasants, so when the commissars appointed a council of workers, they spared us, and let us go on with our lives. Very honestly, a lot of them had boots for the first time—it was the deportees who went barefoot—so they needed us and they knew it.

“Still, some of my family didn’t fare so well. One of my sisters was a nun, she disappeared. Another sister was married to a clerk in the district administration—they were sent east in freight cars. Gone. Door of the house banging in the wind, dinner rotting on the table. Make your heart sick to see it. My brother was a sergeant in the army. He’d been captured in the first days of the invasion, but maybe that was better for him. At least he wasn’t arrested, and he came from a unit that had laid down their guns when the Soviet troops said they’d arrived to fight the Germans.

“So him they sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, an NKVD camp called Ostashkov, not far from Smolensk. They really didn’t seem to know what they wanted to do with them. The officers—mostly reserve officers; engineers, teachers, doctors—they took them away, rumor was to a camp in the Katyn forest. Stefan, that’s my brother, and the other enlisted men, they just sat there and starved. Finally, they sent him to Moscow.”

“Moscow! It’s true?”

“It’s true, I swear it. What happened to Stefan was, the Russians thought he was one of them. Almost by accident—but then, that’s how he is. He’s not like me, doesn’t matter what I try it goes wrong. But Stefan’s not like that—if the world had gone on like it always did, he’d be doing very well now.”

The cobbler took another pull at the vodka. He looked off into the dusk, watching fondly as his brother did well.

“What happened?” de Milja said. “At the camp.”

“Oh. He befriended one of the NKVD men.”

“A political officer?”

“No! Nothing like that—a sergeant, just like him. This man had a hunting dog, a spaniel bitch, and his pleasure was to go into the marsh with this dog and perhaps shoot a duck or two and the dog would go into the reeds and bring them back. But the dog got hurt, and it wouldn’t eat, and it was dying. Stefan found out about it, and he told the NKVD man what to do, and the dog got better. And that was the end of it—except that it wasn’t. One day the man came to where he was kept and said, ‘You’re going to have a choice. Everybody here is going to a new camp, in the Katyn forest. For you, it’s better to tell them that you want to go to school, in Moscow.’ And that’s what Stefan did.”

“And then?”

“Well, he came home.”

“Just like that?”

The cobbler shrugged. “Yes.”

“A free man?”

“Well, yes. For a time, anyhow.”

“What happened?”

“Poor Stefan.”

“Another drink? There’s a little left.”

“Yes, all right, thank you. I owe you my life, you know.”

“Oh, anyone would have done what I did. But, ah, what happened to Stefan?”

“Too strong, Stefan. Sometimes it isn’t for the best. He went into the town, I don’t know why. And some German didn’t like his looks, and they asked for his papers, and Stefan hit him.”

“In Rovno, this was?”

“Yes. He managed to run away—a friend saw it and told us. But then they caught him. They beat him up and took him off in one of those black trucks, and now he’s in Czarny prison.” The cobbler looked away, his face angry and bitter. “They are going to hang him.”

“He has a family?”

“Oh yes. Just like me.”

“Name the same as yours?”

“Yes. Krewinski, just like mine. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Don’t get angry.”

“Shameful thing. It’s the Russians’ fault, they won’t leave us alone.” He paused a moment, took another sip of vodka. “You think there’s hope? I mean, we’re told to pray for this and for that. We’re told there’s always hope. Do you think that’s true?”

De Milja thought it over. “Well,” he said at last, “there’s always hope. But I think you ought to pray for his soul. That might be the best thing.”

The cobbler shook his head in reluctant agreement. “Poor Stefan,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes.